visual studio 2008 - WCF Fails to generate client proxy

Question

I have an odd problem that I just can't seem to diagnose, and it seems to be a PEBCAC thing, but I have spent a good deal of time trying to solve it. I created a WCF service that I host via a windows service. This service has been working fine for a while, and I have a windows forms and a web interface to it. The service was originally developed on XP but I have recently migrated to Windows 7. When I migrated, I found out that the windows security for the service prevented me from using my WinForms app on windows 7, yet it worked just fine on XP talking to the service on Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and XP. To simplify things while in development, I have disabled security completely, and my WinForms app works again on windows7.

I then made some other changes to the WCF service, adding methods, changing data contracts, etc. The only endpoint changes were to disable security on wshttp. Suddenly, updating the service reference for the web app no longer creates the client proxy, but it does generate the wsdl and xsd files. I have tried numerous combinations of the older and newer service on XP and Win7 with the result that:

1. The old service works fine when updating the reference, whether it runs on XP or Win7 and whether the web app code is on XP or Win7.
2. The new service does not create the proxy, whether run on XP or Win7 and whether the web app code is on XP or Win7. I get no errors from the service reference update, however, the configuration.svcinfo and configuration91.svcinfo files have no behaviors, bindings or endpoints listed. The rest of the files look fine.
3. I am able to use svcutil to get the metadata and to generate the proxy code using the new version of the service.
4. When the service reference is updated, I do get two of the items that are part of the data contract showing up in object explorer, but only one of them is correct. I get no client, or other data contract objects.
5. The kicker is that the windows forms app works just fine with the new service, including updating the reference and calling the service methods. Huh?

I have looked at the service, behavior and endpoint definitions in the new service and they match the old one. Nothing online that I could find references such an error. I realize that I must be doing something wrong in the new code, but since it works fine with WinForms app, I am at a loss to explain the difference.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps I can keep some of my hair ;)

-Edit-

After reading the answer I did some more research and tried a few more things:

I have looked at the xsd, etc files for the service with no security and also after restoring things to the way they were in terms of top-level enums with DataContract attribute (have none of these) and also restoring the security values to what they used to be. In both cases, I see nothing amiss, except that the files are named differently: the old service reference uses xsd files with numeric suffixes that range from 2 - 5, whereas the latest one uses 1 - 4 (can't see that this should affect things, since the pointers in the svcmap seem correct). It does make it more difficult to diff things, but I have looked at each file in detail and the data seems correct, just placed into different files.

The wsdl file, after security is restored to the old values is identical except for the host IP and machine name, as expected. But still the configuration.svcinfo and configuration91.svcinfo have no endpoints, behaviors or bindings defined. Also, oddly, of the two data contracts that do get defined, one only has a New member: its data members are not present. This is a data contract that references a class that is marked as Serializable, but is not listed with a DataContract attribute. The only thing that has changed there is that I added a single new string member to the class. What is even more odd is that there is a proper definition of the data contract class in the xsd files.

I'm very confused.

Answer 1

Yes, probably you have a reference to your contracts assembly from your application, and when you generate your proxy by 'Add Service Reference...' you are reusing types in referenced assemblies and that is why your contract entities are not being generated. To fix that when you are adding your service reference I recommend you to click on the 'Advanced' button and then you should uncheck the option 'Reuse types in referenced assemblies" or maybe just remove the contracts assembly reference from your application.

I hope this work out for you!